Backup is arguably the most well understood line of defense for businesses, but not everyone understands that data backup alone is not enough. Even more important than backup is recoverability. And data must be recoverable quickly–every single time it goes down. A backup and recovery solution must protect your entire infrastructure with a goal zero data loss. However, even that is only part of the picture. You also need a strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR).

BCDR is best described as a set of processes and techniques used to help an organization recover from a disaster and continue or resume routine business operations. The term combines the roles and functions of IT and business in the aftermath of a disaster. All businesses, including your customers, have BCDR needs. Few, though, are thinking beyond basic backup, and many neglect to include disaster recovery or business continuity in their plans. Even more concerning, they probably are not backing up properly.

As an MSP, this presents significant opportunity. But only if you go about it the right way.

First, take steps to minimize unplanned downtime for your customers. Even the most minute improvement can make a difference. Ransomware protection, regular backups and aligning your clients’ business requirements should drive your backup strategy. For example, setting backup schedules as well as recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) so that they are aligned with business goals go a long way toward achieving this end.

Once you’ve done everything you can to maximize uptime, accept the fact that unplanned downtime is unavoidable. Natural and manmade disasters happen, and they inevitably bring outages.

MSPs that have a solution in place that enables near instantaneous recovery will have a leg up on the competition–and an additional revenue stream. Those that do not will be challenged to maintain their customer base. Clients that cannot recover their data will not be clients for long.

Choosing a BCDR Solution

For an MSP, a single, comprehensive backup solution is essential. While about 60 percent of MSPs use and thus manage products from multiple backup vendors–often just to build on-premises backup that integrates with the cloud–this presents a host of problems in and of itself from added complexity, poor integration disconnects, alert fatigue, manual error and countless other potential issues.

In addition, few service providers are thinking beyond backup when they choose a solution. But, as we noted, SMBs need more than simple backup. They need BCDR services, and with the newly unveiled Kaseya Unified Backup (KUB), you can provide these functions as an enterprise-class service at an MSP friendly price point.

KUB has you covered from start to finish. First, inspecting every file during each backup for ransomware infections to ensure “clean” instant recoveries. Its unique hybrid cloud structure provides the best of both worlds, combining the speed and accessibility of on-premises backup with a cloud-based tier in case of system failure or disaster. KUB also provides instant recovery for virtual environments.

On top of that are ransomware detection and cloud-based BCDR services. All of these functions are supported by an all-in-one, on-premises storage appliance that integrates with VSA by Kaseya.

Tying this all together is BackupIQ, an artificial intelligence backup assistant that automatically analyzes, prioritizes and automates critical backup and recovery tasks so you can manage and expand BCDR services without adding headcount.

With all client backups fully visible in the VSA dashboard, you can say goodbye to multiple applications for managing customer backups and simplify your stack with a cloud-integrated backup appliance managed from a single console. This simple dashboard gives admins at-a-glance confidence that customer data is protected while keeping the granularity needed to resolve specific issues. Meanwhile, the KUB dashboard provides quick, intuitive and comprehensive access to alerts, reports and policy management.

Additionally, the dashboard is designed to provide fully automated recovery assurance testing, an integral and often overlooked aspect of a reliable disaster recovery solution. It also offers meaningful reports replete with measurable, trustworthy, and repeatable RPO and RTO metrics.

And when you do go down, KUB gets you back up and running quickly. Its on-prem failover reduces unplanned downtime and makes recovering from an outage near seamless. MSP clients can be back up and running quickly.

Learn more about how better BCDR and enterprise-class backup can help you grow your business.

Joining Kaseya in 2012, Miguel Lopez brings over 20 years of experience to his role as SVP, Managed Service Providers (MSPs). In this position, he consults daily with MSPs to help them solve their clients’ business problems with technology solutions. Prior to joining Kaseya, Miguel served as the director of consulting services for All Covered, a nationwide technology services company that is a division of Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA Inc. In 2008, All Covered acquired NetCor Technologies, a leading MSP that Miguel founded and managed since 1997. NetCor specialized in serving highly regulated industries such as healthcare, CPAs, law firms and retail companies.

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